Thursday, September 12, 2013
Alice Walker, Autobiographical Contract, and Sciences of Memory
[By Jerry Ward, Jr.]
Definition is essential.
What does womanist mean and what is its relation to feminist? Does the
assertion that womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender explain
saturation as a major difference in historical experience? The various essays,
bits of interviews, poetry (inside prose frames) and reviews collected in Alice
Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983) suggest an answer. They
suggest that Walker the novelist is of a “revolutionary” mind like a furious
flower, is as serious as was Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade
Bambara. These women assumed the freedom to create is an entitlement of nature
not of man. And they have the backing of words attributed to Sojourner Truth in
1851: “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to
do wid Him.”
Walker’s
attitude toward literature has a faint echo of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Do not confuse attitude with heritage.
Mountains are gendered property, and in Walker’s case, Sojourner Truth holds the
mortgage! Interpretation can take the guise of paying interest, escrow, and
principle.
And Rose asked in the same paragraph: Or are we doomed to live always in the divided worlds of subjectivity and objectivity, with no translation possible between these languages? (7)
Walker’s recent thinking about her autobiographical contract appears in the appended reader’s guide for Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Asked what inspired her to write the novel, Walker replied: “So in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart I set out to chart such a journey, the adventures of Kate Nelson Talkingtree, who is named partly for a grandmother, my father’s mother, who was murdered when he was a boy.” This novel incorporates Walker’s quest for the culture of the Grandmother, her keeping the faith with the autobiographical contract. Through fiction, Walker provisionally confirms Steven Rose’s idea that sciences of the collective -- “ecology and ethnology, sociology and economics” (7-8) -- are better instruments than the sciences of “individual psychology or neuroscience” (7) for exploring the nature of memory. The jury is still out, however, on any permanent conjoining of subjectivity and objectivity, inside or outside of fictions.
Walker’s
trope of the garden has a great deal to do with memory and with the fact that
canonized writers have no monopoly in cultivating ART. Context requires
remembering that Walker first broadcast ideas about mothers and gardens at the
1973 Phillis Wheatley Festival in Jackson, Mississippi and remembering I had
taught The Third Life of Grange Copeland the previous year. My memory of
that event and of my teaching has been reactivated by how the biologist Steven
Rose commented on the Rosetta Stone in The Making of Memory
(1992):
Memory
pervades ancient ballads and modern novels alike. Especially in the present
century, from James Joyce and Marcel Proust to the new writing of Margaret
Atwood, of J. G. Ballard, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Alice Walker, the
theme of personal memory, of the constant examination, interpretation, and
reinterpretation of lived experience, is central.
And Rose asked in the same paragraph: Or are we doomed to live always in the divided worlds of subjectivity and objectivity, with no translation possible between these languages? (7)
Mother transmits the seed of art and the desire to grow
it into ART to daughter. We are expected
to read the fine print in the title essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” as
Walker’s autobiographical contract.
Walker’s recent thinking about her autobiographical contract appears in the appended reader’s guide for Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Asked what inspired her to write the novel, Walker replied: “So in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart I set out to chart such a journey, the adventures of Kate Nelson Talkingtree, who is named partly for a grandmother, my father’s mother, who was murdered when he was a boy.” This novel incorporates Walker’s quest for the culture of the Grandmother, her keeping the faith with the autobiographical contract. Through fiction, Walker provisionally confirms Steven Rose’s idea that sciences of the collective -- “ecology and ethnology, sociology and economics” (7-8) -- are better instruments than the sciences of “individual psychology or neuroscience” (7) for exploring the nature of memory. The jury is still out, however, on any permanent conjoining of subjectivity and objectivity, inside or outside of fictions.
